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Misjudgment, mistakes and pure farce prove Cameron’s undoing

Sam Coates

August 30 2013, 1:01am, The Times

David Cameron was warned by one Tory MP that “anger is not a strategy”Reuters

Last night’s 13-vote defeat was caused not only by catastrophic failure of political intelligence and misreading of the parliamentary mood but also sheer clumsiness by some of the coalition’s most senior ministers.

Justine Greening drove from France, but after going through the division lobbies once, left for a meeting. The International Development Secretary, who was seeing Mark Simmonds, a Foreign Office Minister, said she missed the vote on the government motion because the division bell in her room failed to ring.

First she blamed the clerks, then she demanded the Speaker re-run the vote, which he refused. One colleague accused her of “sheer ineptitude”, saying that everyone had known there would be two votes at 10pm.